DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 36C: Hunting the Hunters

They headed back up to Oldtown and gathered Ranthir from the Nibeck Street mansion. From there they retraced Elestra’s steps, rapidly tracking the query-laden trail of the cultists who had been asking after “Laurea”.

They caught up with them in the Boiling Pot, a small tavern in the southern end of Oldtown. There were five of the cultists – easily picked out from the crowd by their prominent tattoos depicting black hands. Each also appeared to be marked by some horrible deformity or mutation. They were scattered throughout the crowd, asking their questions.

Tor and Tee, having barely stepped through the door, turned to look at each other – forming a plan of action in less than a glance. They split off from the others (who were left somewhat confused near the door). Tor headed into the crowd, quietly warning people that they should leave. Tee, meanwhile, palmed a dagger and headed towards a cultist who was draped over the bar, favoring a hideously twisted arm.

What’s described in the journal here is basically what happened at the table: Tee’s player and Tor’s player look at each other and, without saying a word, knew exactly what their play was going to be. The other players were momentarily baffled and just kind of carried along in their wake.

This sort of thing, at both macro- and micro-scales, will happen all the time in an RPG campaign as the group racks up time playing together. You’ll spend less time talking your way through all the options and more time knowing exactly what’s going to happen next.

You can often see this in a very tangible way during combat. It’s one of the x-factors that make challenge ratings and similar encounter building tools “unreliable,” because groups that get into this groove will not only make fewer mistakes, they’ll start discovering collaborative tactics and synergies between their characters that can greatly increase their effectiveness both tactically and strategically.

It’s also why I think, in a game like D&D, it’s important for PCs to spend at least three sessions at each level. Because it’s deeply rewarding to learn new abilities, play around with them for a bit, and then master them before adding even more new stuff. And what we’re kind of talking about here is that there’s even another level beyond mastering our own character’s abilities, and that’s when you start mastering the other PCs’ abilities: You know what they need. You know how to set things up for them. You know what weaknesses they have and how you can defend them.

But as you can see from the example of this session, this sort of party chemistry – the collective mastery of the group – extends beyond combat. Whether it’s solving mysteries or masterminding heists, the group will be learning what techniques work best, and they’ll be refining those techniques with experience. Where do you look for clues? How do you gather intel on your target? Who’s best at this? Who enjoys doing it the most? (Try to get these last two to align… although breaking up these patterns of behavior and seeing what happens when people are thrust into unfamiliar circumstances can also be fun.)

Another fairly concrete example of this is splitting the party: When the PCs need to do X, which subgroup becomes their go-to? If you’re a player, consciously realizing that this is a thing and consciously thinking about how you can improve your results can be a really big deal. If you’re the GM, recognizing these patterns can allow you to either play into them with confidence OR spice things up a bit by deliberately challenging the easy habits of the group. (When they need to do X, that’s usually character A. But when they need to do Y, they usually send A, B, and C to do it. Well… if you frame things up so that X and Y need to happen at the same time, then the players will feel pressure. Where is A most needed?

Along these same lines, something else that can be easy to overlook is that, as the GM, you’re ALSO part of the group. As you run more and more game, it’s not just that you’re gaining more experience as a GM. It’s that you’re gaining more experience running games for that specific group. You’ll learn the types of stuff the group likes to do, and you’ll figure out better ways of handling the actions they propose. You’ll also learn how to counter their best shots. (And there’s endless philosophical debates about how/when/if it’s appropriate for you to do that.)

And it’s not just about how you handle them at the table. This chemistry with the group, and understanding that each group’s chemistry is unique, will also improve your prep: You’ll figure out not only what you should be prepping to be “ready” for the players, but also what will let you rise to the opportunity and help them soar.

Campaign Journal: Session 36D – Running the Campaign: Missing the Obvious
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

SESSION 36C: HUNTING THE HUNTERS

January 24th, 2009
The 19th Day of Kadal in the 790th Year of the Seyrunian Dynasty

CATCHING THE HUNTER’S SCENT

While the others had gone to Mahdoth’s and the Hammersong Vaults, Elestra had been walking the streets of Oldtown. Two stories were competing among the newssheets, the rumor-mongers, and the tavern-hangers. Headlines proclaiming “Blood in the Bathhouse” and the like led stories relating to the events in the Row Bathhouse, while “Vile Rites Performed in Oldtown” spoke of what the City Watch had discovered in the Oldtown apartment complex used by the cultists.

Their involvement in both affairs were not the subject of wagging tongues, but there were other whispers circling through the city: People were asking all over town for “Laurea” (the pseudonym Tee had used with the cultists).

It was nearing the time when they would need to refresh the alarm they had placed on the door in the Banewarrens. Ranthir volunteered to do so and remain behind, freeing Elestra to return to the Ghostly Minstrel with the others.

On the way, they returned the golden key to Tee’s vault and stopped by the Temple of Asche to relieve the en it had placed on her soul. When they reached  Delver’s Square, Tee let the others head into the inn ahead of her while she went down into the Undermarket to check in with the Delver’s Guild. There she found waiting for her a message to “Laurea” from the cultists:

YOUR PAYMENT WILL BE IN KIND.

Grimacing, Tee went to join the others in Ghostly Minstrel. But even there they discovered that Iltumar had been asking around the common room earlier that day for “Laurea”.

“Oh, Iltumar…” Tee murmured.

HUNTING THE HUNTERS

They needed to deal with this before it got out of hand. The good news, at least, was that Tee’s true identity hadn’t been discovered. At least not yet. But they feared it was only a matter of time. “They’ve got descriptions for all of us,” as Elestra put it.

They headed back up to Oldtown and gathered Ranthir from the Nibeck Street mansion. From there they retraced Elestra’s steps, rapidly tracking the query-laden trail of the cultists who had been asking after “Laurea”.

They caught up with them in the Boiling Pot, a small tavern in the southern end of Oldtown. There were five of the cultists – easily picked out from the crowd by their prominent tattoos depicting black hands. Each also appeared to be marked by some horrible deformity or mutation. They were scattered throughout the crowd, asking their questions.

Tor and Tee, having barely stepped through the door, turned to look at each other – forming a plan of action in less than a glance. They split off from the others (who were left somewhat confused near the door). Tor headed into the crowd, quietly warning people that they should leave. Tee, meanwhile, palmed a dagger and headed towards a cultist who was draped over the bar, favoring a hideously twisted arm.

Tee tried to strike up a conversation with the cultist at the bar, trying to get some sense of whether the cultists were still asking after “Laurea” or if they had some inkling that it was a false identity.

Tor’s ministrations, however, didn’t go unnoticed. One of the cultists, seeing what he was doing, started crossing the tavern towards him. As the cultist’s hand landed on Tor’s shoulder, however, Tee sprung into her action – her palmed dagger easily gutted the cultist in front of her.

Confusion instantly exploded from one side of the tavern to the other. Two more cultists rushed her from either side, but Tee slit the throat of one while drawing her rapier to run the other through.

Tor meanwhile had drawn his own blade with preternatural speed and leveled it at the throat of the cultist who had approached him (taking advantage of the confusion Tee had created on the other side of the room). “Yield.”

The cultist went for his sword and Tor cut open his throat. The last cultist came running up behind him and was almost instantly cut him down as well.

The entire blood-soaking confrontation had taken only seconds.

Tor turned to face the remaining patrons, who were mostly frozen in shock. “Sorry about that. We were hoping to get you out of here before what needed to happen happened.”

The bartender was incensed. “Who’s going to clean up all this blood?!”

Tee dropped ten gold pieces onto the bar.

The bartender immediately scooped them up. “I’m going to clean up this blood… Now if you wouldn’t mind leaving before the watch shows up.”

Tee quickly had Ranthir write a note (using his great skill with pen and ink to scribe it in a different hand):

PAYMENT NOT NECESSARY.

Using a common dagger, she fastened it crudely to one of the dead cultist thugs.

Running the Campaign: Group Chemistry – Campaign Journal: Session 36D
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Go to Table of Contents

As described in Part 4B, you have everything you need for the PCs to penetrate to the heart of the Kraken Society conspiracy and rescue King Hekaton.

But what if you want to take this even farther?

Here are some options. You can easily use one, some, all, or none of them.

OPTION #1: ADD A STORM GIANT THREAT

The storm giants know that King Hekaton and Queen Neri were meeting with representatives of the Lords Alliance and the Open Lord of Waterdeep, and they assume that the small-folk are guilty of murdering the queen and kidnapping the king. Isn’t it possible that, with or without Serissa condoning the action, the storm giants might be making retaliatory strikes on the coast and/or coastal shipping?

You can easily add this element to the adventure, adding aggressive attacks by the storm giants that mirror those from the other giant factions, and creating a new vector for the PCs to learn about Hekaton’s disappearance and/or get pulled into the politics of Maelstrom.

(The potential drawback to this option is that it removes the contrast between the storm giants — who have simply gone radio silent under the waves while their former subjects run wild — and the other giant factions.)

OPTION #2: THREE CITY HOOKS

To remove the element of random chance from the PCs getting pulled into the Kraken Society investigation, add explicit hooks from each of the Three Cities pointing to the Uninvolved nodes. (These connections do not have to be direct, of course, or even terminate with the Kraken Society. You just need quest lines that intersect with the Kraken Society nodes.)

Alternatively, you can have missions given to the PCs by any factions they choose to join to point them to these nodes.

OPTION #3: EXPAND THE KRAKEN SOCIETY

To expand the Kraken Society’s presence in the campaign, add more Uninvolved nodes throughout the Sword Coast and Savage Frontier. You can do this by just flipping through Storm King’s Thunder, picking a location from the gazetteer, and then brainstorming ways that krakenar agents could be trying to infiltrate that location.

As with the extant Uninvolved nodes, include clues in these nodes pointing to other Uninvolved nodes and also the Involved nodes. (Remember that your structural goal is to pull the PCs towards the Involved nodes, where they can find the clues leading to Hekaton.)

One particular place you could look at is the Dessarin Valley, where Ghald & Unferth are trying to launch multiple krakenar operations. Lord Drylund’s operation in Yartar is also located here. By adding several Kraken Society operations throughout the valley, you could turn the whole region into a micro-campaign within the campaign.

OPTION #4: BURY THE INVOLVED NODES

In the default structure, the PCs can run into either the Uninvolved nodes or Involved nodes during the Phase 3 pointcrawl. If you want to create a greater sense of depth in the Kraken Society conspiracy, however, then DON’T make the Involved nodes accessible directly from the pointcrawl: The only way to reach the Skum Lord, Reefkin, or Lord Drylund is via clues picked up in the Uninvolved Nodes (which remain accessible from the pointcrawl).

In practice, this will create a flow from Uninvolved nodes to Involved nodes to Purple Rocks to the Morkoth. The players will truly feel like they’re getting pulled deeper and deeper into the conspiracy.

This option is probably best used in combination with Option #3. Since you can no longer enter the Kraken Society investigation through the Involved nodes, you’ll likely want a few more Uninvolved options to replace those entry points.

OPTION #5: ENTRY VIA MAELSTROM & WATERDEEP

The burgeoning political crisis between Maelstrom and Waterdeep creates an alternative vector for the PCs to follow.

For example, imagine that the PCs follow a path similar to that suggested in Storm King’s Thunder: They journey to Maelstrom and manage to get an audience with Serissa. She would like to trust them — it’s what her mother would have wanted — but it’s impossible under the circumstances. If they want the storm court’s help (to do whatever it is the PCs came here to ask them to do), then they need to help bring those responsible for her mother’s murder and father’s disappearance to justice.

Rather than giving them a casino chip, however, Serissa is going to point them in the direction of the “treacherous” Knights of the Blue Moon.

Meanwhile, in Waterdeep, Laeral Silverhand knows something has gone wrong: She was supposed to meet with King Hekaton and Queen Neri, but then, from her perspective, they abruptly postponed the meeting and a storm giant raiding party ransacked the Hall of Reflected Moonlight and murdered many Knights of the Blue Moon. (If you’re using Option #1, this may have been followed by additional storm giant raids.)

If the PCs are already working with the Lords Alliance or Harpers, it’s not hard to imagine that Silverhand might want to call in some agents with a proven track record for dealing with giant issues to get to the bottom of what happened at Red Rocks.

Either way, the PCs will get briefed on the details of Neri’s Peace — or, at least, a version of those events — and pointed in the direction of Red Rocks, the Hall of Reflected Moonlight, and the Knights of the Blue Moon.

Whichever direction they’re coming from, this investigation could quickly reveal the mismatch in communications between Waterdeep and Maelstrom.

From here, add three clues to reveal the agent responsible. (A chambermaid working for Silverhand? A lesser Knight of the Blue Moon who’s secretly a krakenar agent? Both of them locked in a forbidden tryst and working together?)

This agent, through three more clues, can then point the PCs in the direction of the Skum Lord, for whom they work.

The Skum Lord, of course, is an Involved node, and the PCs are now inside the Kraken Society conspiracy.

Tip: You might find it useful, particularly if you’re using this option, to have Imperator Uther discover Queen Neri’s body and lead the raid on the Hall of Reflected Moonlight during the events of the campaign, instead of having these events play out before the campaign begins. It will be a lot easier to create the sense of high stakes if events are playing out in real time, rather than waiting on hold for weeks or months for the PCs to level up.

OPTION #6: THE EXPEDITION TO ASCARLE

An expedition to the sunken city of Ascarle sounds incredibly cool!

… it’s also a huge undertaking and probably way outside the focus of a Storm King’s Thunder campaign.

If you’d nevertheless like to provide a path for the PCs to follow to Ascarle — one more layer hidden within the Kraken Society conspiracy! — then I’d recommend placing clues in Purple Rocks and on the Morkoth pointing the way.

Go to Part 4D: The Hekaton Revelations

Go to Table of Contents

To clearly see how the PCs can rescue Hekaton, we need a few key insights.

First, finding Hekaton is not the end of the campaign. For the reasons we’ve previously discussed, and which we’ll take an in-depth look at in Part 5, Hekaton’s disappearance is not the reason the Ordning is broken, nor will returning him to power restore the Ordning. Therefore, saving Hekaton will not end the campaign.

Importantly, this also means that solving Hekaton’s disappearance doesn’t need to be positioned as the end of the campaign: We don’t need to stop the PCs from “prematurely” solving the mystery and ending the campaign early, which will conveniently make it much easier for us to design a robust scenario for solving it.

So if we shouldn’t think of this as the end of the campaign, how should we think about it? Basically, on par with the other giant factions. “Solving the problem of the storm giants” will likely require a different solution than “solving the problem of the hill giants,” but it slots into the same “there’s something wrong with the giants and it needs to be fixed” structure.

Second, the PCs are not assigned to find Hekaton. Or, at least, they don’t need to be. Maybe they journey to Maelstrom, find a way to befriend Serissa, and she asks of them a boon to prove that not all small-folk are treacherous. Or maybe they’ll end up working for a faction and you could have them order the PCs to rescue Hekaton.

It’s more likely, however, that the PCs will simply discover that Hekaton is missing and then decide to deal with that situation themselves. Or they’ll report it to someone and the response is for that person or faction to ask them to look into it further. Either way, the impetus of action is flowing from the players.

Third, it’s the investigation of the Kraken Society that reveals the plot to kidnap Hekaton, rather than an investigation into Hekaton’s disappearance that reveals the Society. This will probably make more sense as we dive into the specific structure of the remixed investigation, but the key insight is that if the storm giants had been able to find any good leads at the crime scene, then they would already be pursuing those leads, not sitting around for months until a random group of small-folk showed up at their doorstep.

Therefore, logically, if you start from, “Hekaton is missing! How do we find him?” there aren’t any good leads.

The reason the PCs can be the ones to solve this is because, structurally, they approach the problem from a completely different direction.

THE BASIC PLAN

The Kraken Society addendum of the Remix provides a full breakdown of the organization. We’re going to break that organization into separate nodes, and then we’re going to classify those nodes as being either Involved (in the Hekaton conspiracy), Uninvolved, or Distant (and, therefore, unlikely to be encountered by the PCs).

INVOLVED

• Waterdeep – Skum Lord
• Neverwinter – Reefkin
• Yartar – Lord Drylund

UNINVOLVED

• Luskan
• Thornhold
• Dessarin Valley – Ghald & Unferth

DISTANT

• Caer Westphal (in the Moonshae Isles)
• Purple Rocks
• Ascarle

For the moment, let’s discard the Distant nodes. The remaining nodes, whether Involved or Uninvolved, can all be encountered by the PCs during the Phase 3 pointcrawl. Any one of these, when encountered, therefore becomes the PCs’ entry point into the Kraken Society investigation.

In each Uninvolved node, include clues pointing to:

• One or more Involved nodes.
• One or more Uninvolved nodes.

In each Involved node, include clues pointing to:

• Optional: One or more Uninvolved nodes.
• The other two Involved nodes.
• The Morkoth and how the PCs can locate it. (See below.)

And we’re done. The PCs can encounter one or more Kraken Society nodes while traveling across the Sword Coast and/or Savage Frontier, then follow the clues they find until they reach Hekaton. (Potentially unraveling krakenar operations as they go.)

THE LUSKAN AGENDA

To include Luskan on the list of Kraken Society nodes above, we’re presuming that there’s some fresh operation afoot there to reestablish the Society’s presence in the City of Sails.

It’s possible that this operation was under the command of Tholtz Daggerdark (SKT, p. 221), who we might characterize as a member of the Arcane Brotherhood. Daggerdark is now the captain of the Morkoth… perhaps the ship was built in the shipyards of Luskan? And the Kraken Society’s current scheme might have something to do with those shipyards, too?

FINDING THE MORKOTH

The basic concept here is that the Morkoth is sailing aimlessly through the Trackless Sea in the vicinity of the Purple Rocks, loaded up with wards that will prevent divination spells from revealing its location or the location of anyone or anything onboard.

This scenario is fundamentally sound, but it obviously means that the PCs need to (a) learn that Hekaton is onboard the Morkoth and (b) figure how to actually locate the Morkoth.

In the book, there’s one method for doing this: Drylund tells the PCs that the Morkoth is in the Trackless Sea and then the PCs just sail around randomly hoping they bump into it.

This option is not particularly compelling, and since it feels pretty hopeless unless you know that The Plot™ is going to deliver you to the ship, you may end up in a situation where the players just won’t go to the Trackless Sea because they’ll be convinced they need more information before they can succeed.

With that being said, keeping “we know the ship is somewhere in the Trackless Sea, so let’s just sail around and see if we can spot it” as a backstop option isn’t a bad idea. Fortunately, there are also some other options we could use:

• The PCs discover navigational charts indicating where the Morkoth will be so that they can intercept it. The most logical reason for these charts existing is that someone in the Kraken Society has a reason for periodically intercepting the Morkoth; e.g., to deliver fresh supplies.
• Alternatively, the PCs discover a beacon designed specifically to pierce the wards around the Morkoth and allow a ship to find it. (Probably for similar reasons to the navigational charts. Or perhaps the ritual which wards the Morkoth even from divine eyes actually requires the creation of the item as a lynchpin for the spell.)
• The PCs access the kraken’s lighthouse. This powerful psionic artifact is attuned to kraken’s compasses, which are carried by ships and undersea agents loyal to Slarkethrel. The system allows for hyper-accurate navigation, but also allows those in control of the lighthouse to keep an eye on everyone using the system. The Morkoth is using a kraken’s compass to avoid other ships in the region, and it’s a key weakness in its wards.
• There’s a permanent teleportation circle onboard the Morkoth. If the PCs can learn the sigil sequence for this circle, they can teleport straight to the ship.

You can pick whichever one of these sounds most compelling to you, and have the clues in the Involved nodes point to it.

Alternatively, they could ALL be true, with each Involved node having one of them as an option. There is a point, though, where a superfluity of options will make the Kraken Society feel childishly incompetent in their efforts to secure the Morkoth, which will also cheapen the players’ sense of accomplishing in conquering it.

So what I would recommend is picking the one you like best, putting it at Purple Rocks (so that the PCs have to go into the heart of the creepy krakenar cult), and then putting clues in all of the Involved nodes pointing to Purple Rocks.

With this done, you’ll have woven all of the Kraken Society nodes together, collectively pointed them through the Three Clue Rule at the Morkoth, and created multiple entry points the PCs can use to enter this knot of nodes and begin exploring them.

You’re good to go.

Go to Part 4C: Expanding the Path

DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 36B: The Madness of Mahdoth

But this time their conversation returned to the strange, obsidian box that Ranthir had found in his rooms upon awaking for the first time at the Ghostly Minstrel.

“I really want to know what’s in there,” Tee said.

“Maybe it’s a magic box. Maybe our memories are trapped inside,” Ranthir said, only half-joking. “We just open the box and we get our memories back.”

But wishing the box open wouldn’t make it happen…

… unless they’d been over-looking the solution.

“What about the key from Pythoness House?” Tor asked. “The one that can open any lock?”

In Night of Dissolution, the published adventure mini-campaign by Monte Cook that I’m using for part of In the Shadow of the Spire, everything kicks off when the PCs fight a couple ogres and end up with a treasure chest they can’t open. Due to some strong warding, they’re meant to conclude that the only way to open the chest is by obtaining Neveran’s all-key, a powerful magical device that (a) can open any door and (b) was last seen in Pythoness House.

This hooks the PCs and send them to Pythoness House, where they eventually obtain the all-key and open the chest (which contains some miscellaneous magic items).

For a published scenario, this is a pretty good scenario hook. But published scenarios, of course, are extremely limited in the types of scenario hooks they can use: The writer doesn’t know who your PCs are and they don’t know what’s going on in your campaign, so they can obviously only present broad, generic hooks.

(I talk about this more in my video on Better Scenario Hooks.)

In the case of this specific hook, it means that:

• The ogres are basically just a random encounter.
• The hook to the all-key is a little weak. (The PCs are just supposed to make a Knowledge check to remember that the all-key exists and that it might help them.)
• The stuff inside the chest are just generic magic items.

The all-key itself is, notably, also just a McGuffin: Its function is to get the PCs to Pythoness House, where they’ll start getting wrapped up in the lore and machinations of the chaos cults that will drive the rest of Night of Dissolution, but it remains largely irrelevant to any of those events (except insofar as the PCs might make use of it, of course).

A generic hook like this in a published adventure isn’t really a flaw. (It’s not as if Monte Cook can magically divine what will be happening in your campaign.) But, as a GM, you should definitely view them as an opportunity.

And what makes the hook from Night of Dissolution pretty good, as I mentioned, is that Cook has seeded it with a bunch of juicy elements that you can easily leverage.

• The ogres carrying the chest: Where did they get it? Who are they delivering it to? Where do the PCs encounter them, exactly?
• Of course, the ogres aren’t required: A chest that cannot be opened. You could find that almost anywhere.
• And what’s in the chest? You can swap out the generic magic items for almost anything that the PCs might want or need.

Think about whatever campaign you’re running right now (whether it’s a D&D campaign or not): What could you put into a box the PCs can’t open that would be vitally important to them? Or, alternatively, who could the box belong to that would make finding it feel likely a completely natural and organic part of your game?

In my case, I knew that I was going to use Night of Dissolution as part of Act II in my campaign even before the campaign began. (We’ve previously discussed how the triggers for Act II were set up.) This meant that I could not only weave the box and all-key into the ongoing events of the campaign, I could also weave it into the PCs’ backgrounds during character creation.

In this case, this just meant that the PCs started the campaign with the box they couldn’t open, presenting an immediate enigma that was tied into the larger mystery of their amnesia.

The contents of the box were, of course, further keyed to that mystery and are, in fact, laying the groundwork for triggers much later in the campaign, too. (No spoilers here! You’ll just have to wait and find out like my players!)

The other thing I wanted to work on was the link from “box you can’t open” to the all-key: A simple skill check felt unsatisfying, and hoping that a player would spontaneously think, “Hey! Let’s do some research into magic items that could help us open this box!” wasn’t exactly reliable.

But I could make it reliable by just scripting it into their amnesia: During their period of lost time, they had done exactly that research, found the answer, and then hired Shim to locate the all-key, setting in motion the chain of events that would have Shim unexpectedly arrive and deliver the information to them.

(It was also possible, of course, that they actually could think to do research and ironically retrace the steps I had scripted for their former selves: That might have led to Pythoness House by a completely different path. Or it might have led them straight back to Shim again. Either way… mission accomplished!)

And that’s all it really took to take a generic McGuffin and integrate deeply into the fabric of the campaign.

Campaign Journal: Session 36C – Running the Campaign: Group Chemistry
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index